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Between Life and Thought
Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion
Don Seeman (Edited by), Devaka Premawardhana (Edited by)
9781487554750
Paperback / softback, published 5 April 2024
278 pages, 9 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg
Existential anthropology is an approach inspired by existential and phenomenological thought to further our understanding of the human condition. Its ethnographic methodology emphasizes embodied experience and focuses on what is at stake for people amid the contingencies, struggles, and uncertainties of everyday life. While anthropological research on religion abounds, there has been little systematic attention to the ways anthropology and religious studies might benefit from better consideration of one another or from the adoption of a shared existential perspective. Between Life and Thought gathers leading anthropologists and religion scholars, including some of existential anthropology’s most recognized advocates and thoughtful critics. The collection opens with a comprehensive introduction to phenomenology and existentialism in anthropology and religious studies and concludes with an analysis of how existential anthropology might address the long-standing problem of constructivism and perennialism in religious studies. The chapters altogether present existential anthropology as an especially generative paradigm with which to rethink and remake both anthropology and the academic study of religion. A timely and significant intervention across multiple areas of research, Between Life and Thought is an invaluable source for critically exploring the prospects, as well as the limits, of an anthropological approach to religion grounded in experiential ethnography and existential thought.
Introduction: Religion, Phenomenological Anthropology, and the Existential Turn 1. Existential Anthropology and Religious Studies: A Personal Account 2. Eye and Mind Revisited: The Work of Art in Ethnography 3. Blood, Flesh, and Emotions: An Anthropologist and Her Fieldwork in Meatpacking Plants 4. Recesses of the Ordinary: Michael Jackson’s Reinvention of Philosophical Anthropology 5. Ruta Graveolens: Open and Closed Bodies in a Bahian Town 6. Destiny as a Relationship and a Theory 7. Worlds Colliding? Transnational Religion in Phenomenological Perspective 8. The Plain Sense of Things: Time, History, and the Dream 9. Boundary Situations: An Existential Account of Wounded Healing 10. Sartre’s Jews and Jackson’s Witches: What (Who) Is Real in Existential Anthropology? Afterword: "Not Ethnology but Ethnosophy!" Contributor Biographies Index
Devaka Premawardhana
Michael Jackson
Paul Stoller
Kristy Nabhan-Warren
Tyler Roberts
Mattijs van de Port
Samuli Schielke
Kim E. Knibbe
Aditya Malik
Sónia Silva
Don Seeman
Michael Lambek